Let’s speculate together tomorrow. Open chat at noon central time, 10 June. You should be home from church by then, right?

Once again, we’ve got people behaving badly, and numerous think pieces popping up stating that people are behaving badly. Here’s a reasonably good example with a good summary of the problem that somehow doesn’t resolve anything: Why are (some) Star Wars fans so toxic?

I don’t know about you, but when I see a question posed as a headline, I expect that somewhere in the body there will be an answer proposed and argued. We do get a good description of the problem, at least.

It’s a poisonous tributary of fanboyism that appears again and again. Earlier this week, Kelly Marie Tran, the Vietnamese-American actor who plays Rose (and the first WoC in a lead role in the saga) deleted all her Instagram posts. While Tran hasn’t specifically stated that online trolling is the reason she left social media, since the release of The Last Jedi in December she’s been on the receiving end of a torrent of online abuse. Some comments voiced dissatisfaction with the character of Rose itself, or deemed it necessary to attack Tran personally about her performance. Others were more concerned about her gender and her race. For an idea of what she’s been dealing with, one individual even went so far as to amend Rose’s entry on the Wookiepedia Star Wars wiki to read, “Ching Chong Wing Tong is a dumbass fucking character Disney made and is a stupid, retarded, and autistic love interest for Finn. She better die in the coma because she is a dumbass bitch.” If constant invective like this is the reason for Tran leaving social media – if she thought it best to sever the unbroken line of communication between her and the type of person who thinks sending this to a stranger is the right thing to do – then you can hardly blame her.

That individual? Total asshole. An embarrassment to his mother and his entire family line. Someone who ought to be fired from his job, his girlfriend ought to leave him, his computer and his phone thrown in a dumpster, and who should be quarantined until he gets extensive retraining in how to be a human being. But what is the problem with Star Wars fandom? (And note that we could substitute lots of different things for the words “Star Wars”: atheism/skepticism, veganism, Unix, beanie babies, science, whatever). The question is “WHY?”, not “WHO?”

I am so goddamn familiar with this ongoing problem that it doesn’t help to see another turd bobbing about in yet another genre punchbowl. I’m cynical enough to expect the situation to arise everywhere, and I don’t think it contributes to a solution to try to analyze the punch, rather than the turd.

Anyone who followed GamerGate is probably already drawing parallels between the misogyny of that sorry affair and these hissy fits in reaction to harmless pieces of family entertainment. The most vocal offenders in Tran’s case, as always, are an infinitesimal minority of the millions around the world who enjoy the films, or at least don’t feel the need to harass those they perceive as being to blame if they don’t. These males – and it is males – feel they have ownership over a piece of entertainment: that geekdom is their safe space, theirs alone, and the newfound mass popularity of the genre is bringing a lot of casuals into their hitherto predominantly straight, white, male dojo. Diversity isn’t what some of them want. Which is bizarre, considering the benefits of diversity are what quite a lot of sci-fi is actually about. But it’s not what these people believe they paid for, and therefore see themselves of having part-ownership of. The sense of entitlement is staggering.

OK, there’s something odd going on here. I know about fandoms, I’ve participated in a few. At their purest, they’re easy to describe: it’s people meeting and saying “You like this thing, too? I love this thing!” and jumping up and down while simultaneously gushing about their favorite part. I’ve seen it at science fiction conventions, and at evolutionary biology meetings. It’s beautiful. It’s community. It isn’t flawless, because there are always those annoying human problems: there’s always someone competitive who has to show that they love that thing more, and there are bad attempts to gloss over misbehavior, like that Big Name fondles young fans, because they love the thing so much that we mustn’t mention anything that might taint it, but this feels like something different. This isn’t the usual clumsy, socially maladroit behavior of overly-enthusiastic geeks, or the fumbling efforts to willfully avoid seeing bad behavior.

This feels like something intentional and malicious.

You know you can belong to multiple fandoms at once, right? When you talk about the people in Star Wars fandom, you’re actually talking about a collection of very different overlapping interests. There are the cosplayers who see it as a target-rich environment with many exotic costumes, but they may also view Final Fantasy fandom as another fine place to play. There are cinemaphiles who just adore the approach to technology of the movies, and look at other science fiction movies through the same lens. This is not a problem. It’s actually a plus when people with different perspectives on the same thing interact.

Except…I think there’s another kind of fandom that has been growing for decades now. Let’s call it the Dark Fandom, or DF for short, just to pin a label on it. This is a fandom that celebrates snideness, jeering, crudity, and taking a dump in the punchbowl. It’s 4chan/8chan. It’s a substantial chunk of Reddit. It’s YouTube comment sections. It’s community, too. It’s people coming together and saying, “You hate feminism? I hate feminism even more! High five!” or “Hey, you like trashing parties? Let’s invade rec.pets.cats and piss off some normies!” (Yeah, this has been a phenomenon since the early days of usenet).

This isn’t necessarily a problem with Star Wars fandom. It’s a problem with that segment of Star Wars fandom that overlaps with the DF. Or the atheists who are card-carrying members of the DF. Or the gamers who enjoy a particular video game, but think the game culture could use some more DF. Just as cosplayers might want to participate in a fandom with cool costumes, these people want to join in with more cool shitposting.

That’s the real problem. The question is what are we going to do about it?

We need ways to identify DF members, first of all. I’ve generally found that anyone who is proud to have participated in 4chan, for instance, is almost always pure poison. Anti-feminism isn’t a coherent position, it’s simply a pathology of bros, so that’s a useful marker. But 4chan was anonymous, not every discussion is about feminism, and people can use DF tactics for all kinds of causes.

We need to ostracize the DF. We all sort of do this already: someone who is disruptive and who contributes nothing but complaints and bitterness tends to be unwelcome at meetings and in any kind of productive interaction. But all too often we let them linger on, maintaining an association. We usually think of a synthesis of overlapping fandoms as a good thing, and we like to consider a diversity of interests to be a strength. But the DF is a cancer that weakens us when we allow it to persist.

We need to help people get out of the DF. It’s only a first step to kick out members of the DF — we also need a way to let them back in if they change. We need standards of behavior for our own fandoms, so people understand what it takes to be a respectable member of the Star Wars fan club, or whatever.

The bottom line is that we need to recognize that not all fandoms are good, not all are compatible, and take steps to deny associations with shitposting Dark Fandoms, like the ones flourishing in various media right now.

Anthony Bourdain has killed himself. This was a guy who was admired, whose job involved flying to exotic places and eating good food, while probably getting paid far more than I’ll ever see, and still, there was this seed of despair inside of him that led him to end his life.

That just tells me that depression is something deeper than anything that can be addressed by superficialities like more money and more people telling you how much they like you. He was an intelligent, charismatic person, and that wasn’t enough.

It’s not Brexit that is the harbinger of doom. It’s not the latest wave of immigrants that will overwhelm the previous wave of immigrants, the Normans, or the wave before that, the Angles and Saxons. It’s not the threat of loony dimwit Charles inheriting the throne.

It’s that The Guardian has published an heretical article questioning the bedrock of British sensibility.

Tea is shit. We don’t examine this enough in England. We just putter along, thinking tea is good; but it’s not good. It’s a lukewarm mug of leaf water, presented as a cure-all for life’s ills. “Nice cup of tea,” people say, when you’ve watched a vivid car accident or been given a terminal diagnosis, or gone for a walk and it’s started raining. Whether the mafia has kidnapped you and made you kill a man with a gun to win your freedom or if you’ve done quite badly in an exam, someone will say: “Let me get you a nice cup of tea.”

Whoa. I mean, it is only being published in one of those irrelevant radical northern newspapers, but still, those are dangerous ideas. Collapse is imminent. Chaos will run rampant. What does it even mean to be English anymore if this kind of rubbish is in the air?

Another cuppa is not going to help. Break out the brandy, everyone.

Al Vernacchio is a high school sex ed teacher. He takes the interesting approach of frankly discussing pornography in the classroom…not in a prudish, condemning way, either, but honestly discussing how it’s unrealistic and that real sex is not the predictable mechanical process that you’ll find in internet videos.

…studies have shown that kids are often first exposed to porn — some of it depicting violent or criminal behavior — in their early teens. And analysis has correlated pornography usage with sexual aggression, increased casual sex, and stronger gender-stereotypical sexual beliefs. When I ask Vernacchio what he thinks kids are taking away from porn, he doesn’t miss a beat.

“They learn that men are supposed to be sexually aggressive,” says Vernacchio, who’s known for his TED Talks on sex education and has become a go-to source for the New York Times. “They learn that women are objects. They learn that in the absence of consent, you don’t need a clear ‘yes.’ They learn that sex doesn’t require communication. They learn that you’re supposed to know what to do — like this knowledge gets preloaded into you, and if you don’t know, there’s something wrong with you.”

But that’s not what’s strange and exotic about this guy — he’s just speaking common sense (or what ought to be common sense). This is the bit that convinced me he’s living on an alien planet:

In 20 years at Friends’ Central, Vernacchio has become well known and highly regarded at the progressive, creative-minded private school. Laurie Novo, who’s worked at Friends’ Central (including as co-principal) for 25 years, says she’s never heard a single parent complain about Vernacchio’s classes. In fact, they’re so wildly popular — especially the 11th- and 12th-grade “Sexuality and Society” curriculum — that the school once had to hold a lottery for seats. Casey Cipriani, a 2001 graduate who took the course’s first iteration, says she recalls other students — and even her own mother — asking to read her homework.

Not a single complaint…unbelievable.

Meanwhile, here in Stevens County, Minnesota, United States of America, Planet Earth, our students once elected a gay man to be prom queen, and the community rose up in indignant outrage. Our theater department put on a children’s play that was all about tolerance and diversity, and most of the local schools boycotted it. I’m pretty sure if one of our high school teachers had a talk about the conventions of porn videos and mentioned a few porn sites (that the students already know about, but the parents like to pretend they’re ignorant), I’d be able to witness a lynching.

See you then!

Tuesday, 5 June, at 9pm Central I’ll be babbling in a hangout and taking questions. Feel free to pester me! Anything goes. Except one thing.

I’m on my way home from visiting the grandson. A little context here: Baby Knut is 6 months old. His father is in the army, and they just shipped him off for a training exercise in Louisiana for 6 weeks. My wife & I decided to combine two things: 1) Grandma & Grandpa get to visit and see/spoil the new baby, and 2) Grandma will stay for the full 6 weeks to help out. I’m skipping out early because I have job duties to perform back home, so I can’t stay that long.

I was there for only a week. OMG PARENTING IS THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD. I’d completely forgotten — I speculate there is some form of stress/fatigue related amnesia that totally blanks out your memory of at least the first year, otherwise no one would ever have a second child. It’s the combination of being motivated to do a flawless job, and parenting being a 24 hour a day duty that never, ever stops, and interrupts you with a new crisis every few hours. That crisis might be something trivial, but there is no such thing as a trivial discomfort to a baby. Really. To a baby, being a little bit tired means “I must scream as loud as I can into someone’s ear until I’m so exhausted I pass out.”

It seems to work. Next time I begin to nod off mid-afternoon in the office, I’m going to step into the hallway and howl at the top of my lungs until someone consoles me, and then I’ll shriek some more.

Of course, babies also offer a reward system of giggles and bubble-blowing and cooing, and I think I’m well past my cuteness expiration date, so it’s probably not going to work for me. Dang.

Anyway, when there were four of us working around the clock it was a bit tiring; when my son left for Louisiana and we were three, it was exhausting; now that I’ve left and it’s down to my wife and daughter-in-law, I don’t want to think about it. I especially don’t want to imagine being a single parent, which sounds like it ought to be lethal. If any of you readers were single parents, you have my awestruck respect. How did you survive? And if you were single-parenting and trying to work a job…jesus fucking christ, you deserve a medal and Elon Musk’s salary.

It does make me realize that humans had to have absolutely depended on community during their evolution. Pair-bonding is fine, but even working in pairs to care for the young is inadequate — when I was growing up, we had a big extended family to distribute the load. Academia (and the military, or any other occupation that disrupts familial social relationships) is clearly a terrible idea.

But hey, Knut is a lovely 10kg monster of passions — the joy of a 6 month old is even more extreme than their grievances — so I can see why many of us still try. I’m going to have to give my wife a vacation and spoil her for a while when she gets back home in July.

I guess there are some lines you don’t get to cross. ABC went ahead and gave Roseanne Barr her own show, in spite of a history of terrible Trumpisms and lunatic conspiracy theories — they must have known she was a bomb ticking on the set. But she finally went too far when she made racist comments comparing a former Obama official to an ape, and ABC gave up on dealing with her and cancelled the show. I feel for her co-workers (and especially Wanda Sykes, who quit first), but this is what happens when you agree to work with a terrible human being.

It’s too bad ABC didn’t factor in the repugnance of their star. I think this will mean that Roseanne will be persona non grata almost everywhere…but maybe she can still get a gig at Fox News.